


New Contacts

by blesschu (PeggyLeggy)



Category: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Genre: Gen, new friendship fic, sock slides, suggestion of the whole george wickham mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 21:43:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/931407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeggyLeggy/pseuds/blesschu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia arrives in San Francisco and meets Gigi Darcy for the first time. Sock-slides ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Contacts

Lydia rolls her suitcase wheels in circles as she waits for Lizzie to follow her out of the arrivals gate. She’d met a fan of The Diaries, and while Lydia smiled and gave a high five to the energetic kid and her older brother, Lizzie loves to talk, and she knows that they would be much more interested in The Lizzie Bennet than in her.

Hands grasp at her shoulders and swivel her around. Lizzie comes out of nowhere, fumbling with the word “William”, and running somewhere directly behind where Lydia is now facing. She hears Lizzie’s shoes clack, her case topple over and her dress collide with William. The hands that spun her around reinforce the direction of her head away from Lizzie and William. Lydia flinches and then struggles a little at the skin on skin contact.

“Trust me, Lydia, no one needs to witness what weeks of separation have done to my dear brother,” since her hands are on her ears, Gigi’s voice is somewhat muffled, “I mean, I’m all for displays of affection, but it’s different when it’s William and neither one- Oh my gosh! I was not brought along to this for the sole purpose of saving lives!”

Gigi turns back to them, taking Lydia with her. She sees Lizzie and Darcy break apart, and then embrace. William’s ears are red, and he seems to be thinking along the same lines as his sister. Gigi is wide-eyed and looks as if she only then realised what she was doing. She hastily takes her hands off Lydia. “Lydia, sorry! I didn’t, I, well, I mean... I did but, sorry!”

Lydia takes a step backwards, her shoulders are still bunched up from when Gigi had startled her, and she loops her fingers around her case’s handle.

“Without you I’d probably be puking up rainbows and glitter right now, thanks for saving me,” Lydia looks at Lizzie, pausing before giving a toothless smile to Gigi, “gross.”

She’d planned her first meeting with Gigi a little in her head, daydreaming the turns of phase she could use to introduce herself. But this situation was unexpected, and she hardly even thought she would be at the airport, let alone protecting her from the somewhat more predictable grossness of their older siblings. They have this mutual: ‘I’ve seen your videos, and I feel like I really know you, but I’ve never actually spoken a sentence to you’ awkwardness. It is a strange feeling between them that couldn’t be explained to anyone that hadn’t stupidly had their life wrapped up in the publicity of the Internet. And, in fact, maybe they were the only two in the world.

Lydia realises that _‘hi, I’m Lydia’_ is no longer going to cut it as an introduction to the one and only Gigi Darcy. She is a million ‘one and onlys’ to Lydia. The one an only other to have been broken by George Wickham; the one and only brave enough to confront him and help someone that she had never personally met; and the one and only person that was directly related to the person snogging her perpetually single sister. _Gross_.

Gigi, slightly panicking that she had lost a potential friend with her over enthusiastic ‘life saving’, was now fidgeting with her phone case and running through phrases that wouldn’t make her look anymore hyped up than she actually was. She was seeing Lizzie again, and meeting Lydia properly, of course she was excited! Well, it could be that, or it could be the large mocha milkshake she had devoured in anticipation.

They spoke in unison: “Thank you-“

And then Gigi and Lydia laughed and looked at the ground, each knowing and simultaneously not knowing what they had just been thanked for.

Gigi runs over and takes Lizzie away from William, hugging her until she begs for release. Lydia says hello to William, elbows him a little and raises her eyebrows, saying _how many people do you think saw you then?_ He shouldn’t care, with the number of people who witnessed his first with Lizzie, but she knows that he does. During the week that he spent with Lizzie, at the Bennet dinners and all the other times in between, Lydia finally got to know the real William Darcy; and, to her, the real William Darcy quickly became the big brother that she never had.

Maybe that makes her and Gigi sisters.

“Lydia, my home has a some freshly polished timber floors,” says William, leaning over a little to the side so he is closer to her height.

“Right…” says Lydia, “You’ve got to know by now that I do not have any clue-”

“-And this afternoon Gigi and I moved the furniture and the rugs to the side of the lounge,” he continues speaking over her.

William pulls his hands from out of his pockets and places the brightest and fluffiest pair of purple socks into Lydia’s arms. Her eyes widen.

“Sock slides!” Lydia ran her fingers over the pair, “these are going to be the best sliders ever- feel how soft and slippery the fabric is- look at the colour!” She gives William a quick hug, grinning from ear to ear, “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“I thought that while your sister and I have dinner, you could teach Gigi to slide- and have the sound system, the floor boards, and the unlimited choice of delivered take-out to yourselves. That is if you want to… I know that you do not know Gigi well, and maybe you-”

“This is the best- you’re the best. And from what I’ve heard Gigi is pretty amazing too. Plus I do not need to be a third wheel to you and her-” She turns around to Lizzie and Gigi, “Lizzie! Look at what Darcy got me. Feel how soft they are!”

Lizzie gasps as she brushes her hand over them, and then pulls William down for another kiss.

Gigi smiles and bumps Lydia’s shoulders, pulling a pair of green socks from her handbag.

“I hope you’re ready for this Georgiana Darcy, sock sliding with these babies is going to be more fun than you can comprehend.”

\---

She thinks Gigi Darcy is certainly the most uncoordinated sock slider she’s ever met. Her sliding style is bizarre, somewhere in between ‘the most awkward dance ever’ and giraffe on skates; and she just can’t seem to keep her hands below shoulder height. Well, Lydia knows now that grace was something the Darcy’s just weren’t taught.

Gigi’s singing turns into laughing as she rolls onto the mattress and stops on the piled up pillows. Her face is plastered with a grin as she bops her shoulders and shakes her hands up and down out of beat to the music. The house is perfect for this. The hallway is wide and long, with one side opened up to a balcony so that the music is lost in the night, and leads into the lounge where they’ve built the crash landing site. Plus, William wasn’t kidding about the polished floorboards. Lydia runs and slides and spins her way down the hall, finishing with a dramatic forward roll onto the pillows.  
Gigi giggles while she flicks shuffle on the music on Lydia’s phone and sips her raspberry lemonade. She’d offered some form of alcohol to Lydia earlier, but neither felt like it, and opted for bubbles and sugar instead. Lydia takes a seat on a stool next to her, watching carefully as Gigi handles her phone. It was the first time it had been turned on since the… incident. She flinches a little as it vibrates and another Facebook notification pops up on the screen. Lydia tries not to read the names of who are messaging her. ‘They are just background noise’, Lizzie had once told her, ‘they don’t really know you.’ But had Lizzie known her any better then?

“You’ve got to teach me that one- where you kick your legs out as you spin and then roll onto the pillows,” says Gigi, settling on a song by Florence and the Machine.

“Okay, come on then,” they walk back down the hall, “But you have to promise that you wont knock me out with your penguin arms as I try and perfect your technique.”

“I do not have penguin arms!”

“You totally do.”

“I totally do not.”

Lydia raises her eyebrows. “Accepting the problem is the first stage to overcoming it,” she teases. Shoulder to shoulder they face down the runway, “Right, so when you get to about the door, you have to” she turns Gigi’s shoulders and pulls them back, “ lean back and shift all of your weight back as you kick with that foot there.” she nudges her green fluffy foot back a little, “Just don’t underestimate the power of the polished floor and over do it.”

In that moment, where in she’s teaching the accomplished Gigi Darcy how to sock slide, she thinks: _How exactly did I end up here? I can’t belong here._

“Lydia?” Gigi says. Lydia realises that she must have stopped; her shoulders are raised and tensed. She lowers them slowly, as not to alarm Gigi. “You okay?”

“Yes, I just- never mind.”

_Here are the two girls that George Wickham broke. How can she look at me, and not see him?_

Gigi bellows the chorus of Dog Days Are Over as she slides- totally doing the penguin arms and totally underestimating the power of the polished floor.

_"The dog days are over_  
 _The dog days are done"_

\---

After exhausting themselves getting Gigi to do the The Lydia Kick-Ass Swish and Fall, ‘KASAF’ (“You can’t even pronounce that, Gigi!”), they dragged the mattress and the pillows onto the balcony. There, they look out over San Francisco- over the Darcy’s pool, over the road, the unforgiving hills, and at the lights of the skyscrapers- while picking at the remnants of their Chinese noodle boxes.

“Lydia,” says Gigi quietly.

“Hmm?”

“You’re a great teacher- did you know that? from Lizzie’s videos or from what her and William have both said, it’s something that I never knew, never imagined,”

“I’m… a good teacher?” says Lydia.

“Yeah. Had you ever thought about doing something like that?” Lydia doesn’t respond, and Gigi instantly thinks that she’s hit a sore spot. “Sorry- I do this thing when I meet someone. I look at how they talk and walk, and I try and guess what they do, or what they’re natural at.”

“Gigi, no I- um- I just, I didn’t know how to respond. I’m a natural _teacher?_ ” she said it in disbelief. “Why hasn’t anyone told me before you?”

“Maybe they just never had the chance to see it,” says Gigi.

Lydia stood up, as if she had lost something. She started back towards the house. This was too much. She needed to back it up. Everything that she had tried to forget, everything that she needed to forget, was all coming back. Suddenly she felt sick.

“Thanks,” Lydia pauses. “I’m just going back inside. Get water. Go get some sleep. The flight over wasn’t great for it. Um, see you tomorrow,” she excused herself messily, her words jumbled.

“Lydia-“

The door slid shut behind her.

Her phone vibrated on the countertop. Instinctively Lydia picked it up. She read the notification from someone she barely remembered.

_Hey babe, you in town? Heard that you were getting…_

Another popped up. Similar message. Different guy.

Lydia felt like she was falling, collapsing inwards inside the echoes of party-girl Lydia and sex-tape Lydia and stupid whore-y slut Lydia; and in the confusion that Gigi, of all people, wanted to get to know her, and that she told her she was good at something other than ruining her life and the life of all people around her.

Her face screws up in concentration. Forcing the thoughts of everything and anything way back.

“You,” Lydia mutters, holding tears in, “are stronger than fucking memories, Lydia.”

But she isn’t. Not yet.

The front door opens and Lizzie and Darcy practically waltz in. Lydia looks at them, and then at Gigi who is hurrying inside.

Another message blinks up on her phone. She reads it. It was another one for _her_ , for past-Lydia, for someone that had not been screwed up in love.

She chokes on her tears, clenches the phone in her hand, and runs past Gigi onto the balcony. She flings the phone away from her. It shatters on rocks by the Darcy’s pool and a combination of glass, metal and plastic spray into the depths. Lydia’s breaths come heavy and fast and her knees are weak, but some of the weight has gone from her shoulders and she is relieved it’s gone forever.  
Gigi gets to her first, and wraps her arms loosely around Lydia, trying to hold her together. Lydia responds instantly and buries her head into a shoulder. Lizzie has sprinted to get to her, and pulls both of them into her arms.

“Lydia, I’m sorry I should have been here I-“ Lizzie starts muttering pointlessly.

“William, can you pass me a pen?” Gigi asks, and the three pull apart a little. Lizzie still has her arms around Lydia. William digs one out of his pocket.

Gigi takes Lydia’s arm, turns it over, and writes eight numbers along it.

Lydia smiles a little, comforted knowing that the one and only Gigi Darcy was going to be her first contact in her new life.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been storing my thoughts on these two for a long while. I think that they would be good friends in time. Thanks for reading.


End file.
